AI实验室制造了一把枪射击SWEs，子弹直接穿过了他们自己的客户。
三年来，大AI模型实验室的投球非常简单。 软件工程师是地球上最昂贵的员工。 公司花巨资买下它们所以建立一个AI软件工程师，卖给这些公司，并收取他们不再需要支付的工资。 炒了人，租了机器人实验室把区别都包住了
这是一个可爱的故事。 每一个融资回合、每一个数据中心、每一个关于“取代知识工作”的无气息投资人信件，它有一个洞它如此之大你可以飞一组GPU通过它。
收费亭
软件业务其实是这样的：一个收费亭。 不是工厂，是收费亭
Adobe没有发财，它变得富有，因为建造像Photoshop一样好的东西是困难的。 它花费了数百名昂贵的人，多年的工作和一堆资本，几乎没有人能够尝试。 因此Adobe坐在展台上，从地球上每个设计师那里每月收取一笔费用，永远。 在AI实验室的宏伟计划中
这是整个链条。 用户付费收费亭。 收费亭支付软件工程师的费用。 AI实验室说服收费亭解雇工程师，代之以支付实验室费用。 AI商业计划中的每一美元流经那个摊位。
他们轰炸了亭子
问题在于AI实验室并没有只将机器人工程师卖给Adobe. 他们每个月卖20块给大家
发生什么事了？如果你考虑的时间长于一个收入电话，一个爱好者在周末建造了一个Photoshop替代品。 AI是逆向工程的大规模项目，并以开源的形式发布。 基本上杀死那些想用AI取代所有工人的人的商业模式。 使软件变得有价值的东西，即它很困难的事实，已经溶解在廉价信物的酸浴中。
如果你不知道一个免费克隆人不会付钱给任何人。 当设计师将60美元Adobe的订阅费换成GitHub的周末项目时，其蒸发。 收费亭损失惨重，杀死它的爱好者却只赚了零美元，因为他把它送走。 我发现有趣的是，大公司从来没有意识到他们最大的优势是他们的管理费与他们竞争。 他们让一个人很容易和他们竞争
实验室并未更换收费亭内的工程师。 他们把炸药发给外面的所有人
20块的谎言
现在让我们谈谈这20美元，因为它不是一个代价。 这是营销开支。
许多说法认为，这些编码计划最重的用户通过计算来燃烧，其价格是他们支付的数倍。 一项200美元“优惠”计划每年达到2 400美元。 Google的高级工程师工资不到一个月。 实验室实际上租了一位超人工程师来支付健身会员的费用，而且这笔交易损失了钱。
与此同时，基础设施的账单是天文的。 Amazon,Alphabet和Meta计划了大约5万亿美元2026年的资本支出，其中大部分用于AI数据中心。 所有这些钱都是个赌注总有一天，某个人，某个地方会支付真正的情报费用
补贴本来是当日的桥梁。 而是要为拆除本应在另一边等待的客户支付费用。 这很精彩！摧毁那些成为你主要用户的公司来展示你的用处
没有出口的陷阱
那他们该怎么办？很明显
如果AI实验室有自我保护的感觉，他们就会把模型完全锁起来，按每个“AI员工”每年15万美元的价格，只卖给财富500家公司。 Google和Adobe也赔款，因为它仍然比雇佣便宜，收费亭幸存。 实验室有报酬情报又回到了昂贵的状态，也就是说，有价值。
因为2023年2月24日马克·扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)和开源社区炸毁了卡特尔，在Meta 开源 Llama和中国实验室效仿后，"人工稀缺"大坝破裂。 当街上的人免费交出钻石时
开放量产型号，多为发布免费出中国，已经足以克隆软件，永远无法卸载。 把价格提升到工程师的水平，每个人都在廉价的租用服务器上运行免费的模型。 保持低价，你流血现金当你的补贴产品拆除你的客户基础。
便宜杀客户。 贵杀求。 选择你的毒药不管怎么样持有毒药的人都是人工智能实验室
这是本地的AI应用程序，它甚至看起来像Windows XP.
我们看过这部电影
这是小行星开采问题。 将火箭飞到金块制成的小行星上，你打破了黄金的价格，你的火箭从来没有支付自己。
这些都不是新的。 历史上有很多人做了很多珍贵的东西然后想知道钱去了哪里
- 西班牙银币西班牙将银山运出美洲。 白银失去价值，欧洲各地的物价飙升了一个世纪，拥有矿山的王冠一次又一次破产。
- 德比尔斯。 大约一个世纪以来，德比尔斯公司通过控制供应来保持钻石价格昂贵，这正是AI实验室所需要的策略。 后来实验室培养的钻石出现，稀缺故事崩溃。 将“手工钻石”换成“开放式型号”，在一句话中你就有AI定价问题。
那么，谁来付钱？
我希望每个AI执行官都能慢慢回答
你的计划是向雇佣软件工程师的公司收取他们的工资这些公司通过向难以建造的软件收取费用来赚钱。 你让软件很容易制造你给每个人的这个权力不到每周比萨的价格。 现在收费亭着火了，工程师们被裁员了，而本来应该流向你们的钱蒸发成一千个免费克隆人。
那么，到底谁是客户？那个爱好者付了20美元却让你付出了更多的代价？你忙着烧的收费亭？你刚刚点燃的软件边缘的企业？
AI产业不只是建造替代工程师的工具。 它建造了一台机器，把有价值的东西变成自由的东西，然后把它指向它生存所需要的企业。 这不是一场革命。 这非常昂贵
OpenAI和Anthropic之所以卡住，是因为它们不卖皮克斯(Nvidia)，它们没有大规模独立的业务来保护(Meta)，它们也没有垂直融合。 他们只是开采小行星，倾销银元20美元市场，并看到他们自己的产品价格暴跌到零。
本文由 AI图鉴自动抓取并翻译，版权归原作者所有；如需查看原文请点下方链接。
AI labs built a gun to shoot SWEs, and the bullet went straight through their own customers.
For three years the pitch from the big AI model labs has been beautifully simple. Software engineers are the most expensive employees on Earth. Companies spend staggering sums on them. So build an AI software engineer, sell it to those companies, and collect the salaries they no longer have to pay. Fire the human, rent the robot. The labs pocket the difference.
It’s a lovely story. It’s the story that justified every funding round, every data center, every breathless investor letter about “replacing knowledge work.” And it has a hole in it so big you could fly a fleet of GPUs through it.
The toll booth
Here is what the software business actually was: a toll booth. Not a factory, a toll booth.
Adobe didn’t get rich because Photoshop was made of magic. It got rich because building something as good as Photoshop was hard. It took hundreds of expensive people, years of work and piles of capital, and almost nobody could afford to try. So Adobe sat at the booth and collected a monthly fee from every designer on the planet, forever. That recurring revenue paid the engineers, paid the shareholders, and, in the AI labs’ grand plan, was supposed to pay them.
That’s the whole chain. Users pay the toll booth. The toll booth pays software engineers. The AI labs convince the toll booth to fire the engineers and pay the labs instead. Every dollar in the AI business plan flows through that booth.
They bombed the booth
The problem is the AI labs didn’t sell their robot engineer only to Adobe. They sold it to everyone, for twenty bucks a month!
So what happened? Exactly what you’d expect if you thought about it for longer than one earnings call. A hobbyist built a Photoshop alternative over a weekend. AI is reverse-engineering massive projects and releasing them as open source. Basically killing the business models of the people who wanted to replace all their workers with AI. The thing that made software valuable, the fact that it was difficult, has been dissolved in an acid bath of cheap tokens.
And just in case you didn’t know a free clone doesn’t pay anyone. When a designer swaps a $60 Adobe subscription for a weekend project on GitHub, that money doesn’t migrate to the AI lab. It evaporates. The toll booth loses its toll, and the hobbyist who killed it makes exactly zero dollars, because he gave it away. I find it funny that the big companies never realized that their greatest advantage was their overhead needed to compete with them. They literally made it easy for one person to compete with them.
The labs weren’t replacing engineers inside the toll booth. They were handing out dynamite to everyone standing outside it.
The $20 lie
Now let’s talk about that twenty dollars, because it is not a price. It’s a marketing expense.
By many accounts, the heaviest users of these coding plans burn through compute worth many times what they pay. A $200 “premium” plan works out to $2,400 a year. That is less than a single month of a senior engineer’s salary at Google. The labs are, in effect, renting out a superhuman engineer for the cost of a gym membership, and losing money on the deal.
Meanwhile the bill for the infrastructure is astronomical. Amazon, Alphabet and Meta alone planned roughly half a trillion dollars of capital spending for 2026, much of it for AI data centers. Every one of those dollars is a bet that someday, somebody, somewhere is going to pay real money for intelligence.
The subsidy was supposed to be a bridge to that day. Instead it’s paying for the demolition of the very customers who were supposed to be waiting on the other side. It’s brilliant! Destroy the companies that would be your primary users to show your usefulness. 😂
The trap with no exit
So what should they do? The obvious answer is the one they can’t take.
If the AI labs had any sense of self-preservation, they would have locked down the models entirely, priced them at $150,000 a year per “AI employee,” and sold them only to Fortune 500 companies. Then Google and Adobe pay up because it’s still slightly cheaper than hiring, and the weekend hobbyist gets priced out before he can clone anything. The toll booths survive. The labs get paid. Intelligence goes back to being expensive, which is to say, valuable.
But they can’t because on February 24, 2023 Mark Zuckerberg and the open-source community blew up the cartel. Once Meta open-sourced Llama and Chinese labs followed suit, the “artificial scarcity” dam broke. You can’t run a cartel when the guy down the street is giving away the diamonds for free.
Open-weight models, many of them released for free out of China, are already good enough to clone software, and they can never be un-downloaded. Raise prices to engineer levels and everyone just runs a free model on cheap rented servers. Keep prices low and you bleed cash while your subsidized product dismantles your customer base.
Cheap kills the customers. Expensive kills the demand. Pick your poison, and either way, the people holding the poison are AI labs.
Here’s a local AI app which runs those open-source AI models on your iPhone or MacBook for free! It even looks like Windows XP. 😂
We’ve seen this movie
It’s the asteroid-mining problem. Fly a rocket to an asteroid made of gold, bring it home, and you don’t become the richest person alive. You crash the price of gold, and your rocket never pays for itself.
None of this is new. History is full of people who made something precious abundant and then wondered where the money went.
- Spanish silver. Spain shipped mountains of silver out of the Americas. Silver lost its value, prices across Europe soared for a century, and the crown that owned the mines went bankrupt again and again.
- De Beers. For about a century, De Beers kept diamonds expensive by controlling supply, which is exactly the strategy the AI labs would need. Then lab-grown diamonds showed up, and the scarcity story collapsed. Swap “lab-grown diamonds” for “open-weight models” and you have the AI pricing problem in one sentence.
So who’s going to pay?
This is the question I want every AI executive to answer, slowly, without the word “agentic.”
Your plan was to collect the salaries of software engineers from the companies that employed them. Those companies made their money by charging tolls on software that was hard to build. You made software easy to build. You gave that power to everyone for less than the price of a pizza a week. And now the toll booths are on fire, the engineers are getting laid off, and the money that was supposed to flow to you is evaporating into a thousand free clones.
So who, exactly, is the customer? The hobbyist paying $20 while costing you far more? The toll booths you’re busy burning down? The enterprises whose own software margins you just torched?
The AI industry didn’t just build a tool to replace engineers. It built a machine that turns valuable things into free things, and then pointed it at the businesses it needed to stay alive. That isn’t a revolution. It’s a very expensive way of shooting yourself in the foot and sending the bill to your investors.
OpenAI and Anthropic are stuck because they don't sell pickaxes (Nvidia), they don't have a massive separate business to protect (Meta), and they aren't vertically integrating. They are just mining the asteroid, dumping the silver onto the market for $20, and watching the price of their own product plummet to zero.
Auto-fetched and translated by AI Atlas. All rights belong to the original author.